Book Worm

The greatest injustice you could do to yourself is to read a good book only once. If a book is good, its author had undoubtedly spent a lot of time thinking deeply about the ideas expressed in his book. The insights that emerge from deep thinking are usually not easy to grasp in the first pass.

In fact, most readers who aren’t very familiar with the topic, absorb less than 50 percent of the book the first time. And it’s not because of any shortcoming or lack of intellectual power on the reader’s side. Learning from a good book is very similar to loading a high definition image. Initially, the whole image appears on your screen but it looks blurred. The pixels are large and only give you a vague idea. Give it some time and more pixels load and the image becomes sharper and clearer.

Some books are so dense and rich in knowledge that every time you read them, it feels you’re reading an entirely different book. And that happens because the previous reads prepare your brain to receive the insights from subsequent reads.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: Revisiting Zero to One by Peter Thiel

Continuing the trend from the last month’s bookworm, I am revisiting the book —The Checklist Manifesto by Dr. Atul Gawande — which we had covered in Mar 2015 issue of Value Investing Almanack.

Before we delve deeper, a word about Syntopical Reading.

Mortimer Adler, in his book How To Read A Book, writes that Syntopical Reading is the highest form of reading. In syntopical reading, you read multiple books (in parallel) on the same topic. The goal is not to understand everything discussed in the book, but rather to understand the subject and develop a deep fluency on that one chosen topic. This is all about identifying and filling in your knowledge gaps.

In this post, we’ll go into more details on the topic of checklists. The primary book would be Gawande’s The Checklist Manifesto and we’ll also rummage for investing related insights in Guy Spier’s book — The Education of a Value Investor.

Atul Gawande recently shot to fame when it was announced that three large US corporations — Amazon, JP Morgan, and Berkshire Hathaway — have joined hands to created a healthcare venture and appointed Gawande as the CEO.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: Revisiting The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande

The VIA veterans, i.e., the long time readers of Value Investing Almanack newsletter would perhaps be surprised to see the name of this book because we had already covered it in Nov 2016 issue.

So why am I writing about it again? Because Deep Work is such an important book that it needs to be read and reread.

Nassim Taleb, one of my all time favourite author, writes —

A good book gets better at the second reading, a great book at the third. Any book not worth rereading isn’t worth reading.

Plagiarising Taleb’s words, I say any work worth doing is worth doing deeply. And a book about deep work is worth reading deeply, isn’t it?

So if you haven’t read this book, I am going to hard sell it to you and make a strong case why you need to read, reread, and implement its ideas in your work.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: Revisiting Deep Work by Cal Newport

If I were asked to summarize the essence of behavioural finance into one sentence, it would be this –

The first rule is that you must never fool yourself. Second is that it’s very easy to fool yourself.

This quote comes from Richard Feynman who without an iota of doubt, was past century’s most brilliant theoretical physicists and original thinker. Winning a Nobel Prize and finding the root cause of Space Shuttle Challenger disaster were just some of the less exciting feats of his career. To communicate complex scientific ideas to his audience at all levels — that was his gift.

He wasn’t just a passionate teacher but an inscrutable prankster. Because of his transcendent passion for science and a robust appetite for jokes, he was described as “half genius and half buffoon” by his peer Freeman Dyson.
[Read more…] about Bookworm: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Aldous Huxley an English philosopher once said-

Experience is not what happens to a man; it is what a man does with what happens to him.

In isolation, experience and knowledge are useless. It’s the symbiotic relationship between these two that makes them valuable. Knowledge which doesn’t inspire action has a shelf life of a banana, i.e., it doesn’t last long. When actions don’t refine back the knowledge that initiated them, it’s like throwing darts in the dark.

[Read more…] about Bookworm: The Laws of Medicine